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Are kitty fuckers the new faggots?

Kevin Killian’s “Zoo Story” (which appeared in his collection Little Men and was reprinted in 2009’s Impossible Princess) is about a dude with a fetish for big cats and an obsession with Nastassja Kinski’s character in the 1982 remake of the erotic thriller Cat People.

Kevin’s story seems to anticipate two items that appeared in my Google Reader today. One is a French Orangina commercial where a male (we presume? …because he shaves?) anthropomorphic cougar applies Orangina as aftershave. The other is a cartoon that ages Calvin and Hobbes and sexualizes their relationship (or makes explicit its latent eroticism). I find both of these weirdly hot as well as refreshingly disruptive. The Orangina commercial is just total, deliciously unintelligible WTF on multiple levels, and the cartoon… Calvin and Hobbes are cultural icons that represent a certain construction of childhood innocence and its relationship with imagination and escapism, so there’s this way this image reintegrates our grown-up sexual fantasies with the childhood fantasies our culture so painstakingly desexualizes (…this is interesting too, because I feel like furries and the furry community have a lot of overlap w/ folks into more infantilist fetishes, and also, there is such a sense of escapist play, cosplay, whatever, in furry communities, and also, many of them are serious geeks that are into sci-fi and the like, not unlike the Calvin character).

I think perhaps the Universe is telling me we are on the cusp of a furry revolution.

Somewhere, Snaggletooth is smiling and saying, I’m a gay-coded minstrel no more.